“Get back in there!” schlop!
Testing confirms humans, orcs and night elves use the same generic red blood texture when hit post the update that used a more diverse array of colours. It used to be the case in WoW that orc blood and night elf blood was darker and purplish respectively. Draenei still bleed blue.
For this week’s Lintian’s Obligatory Tolkien Rant, it seems that some fans’ mental model of elves is " inscrutably alien and above the petty concerns of the physical world except when noted otherwise", rather than “basically human-like by default and working like all known typical lifeforms except when noted otherwise” (like with immortality and immunity to disease).
If I see yet another"Do elves need to eat?" post on a Tolkien forum, I’m going to scream. For this particular case there’s a Tolkien quote in supplemental materials that states that yes, they need to eat or they’ll die (there’s also a lot of indirect evidence), but frankly it’s ridiculous that the burden of proof is on those who insist on what should be the default assumption, rather than the proponents of the extraordinary claim.
What do you make of the design of Mell in the infamous Gollum game?
Yeah but how could Legolas jump off those falling rocks if his bones weren’t filled with magic helium??
I don’t know anything about that game and I don’t know who Mell is.
(quickly googles)
I don’t know, her design is not terrible? Her name is weird, though, being a single simple Sindarin word instead of being a compound word like all Sindarin names I can remember right off the bat (like Aragorn “revered king” or Legolas “green leaf”).
See, I would have thought that the whole point was that to some humans or other people of middle-earth, elves seem like these otherwordly ethereal beings. But getting to know them would show that they are, essentially just like everyone else.
Because that is part of Tolkiens writing. All the different people have good and bad folks, hopes and dreams, and fairly regular lives. The differences are smaller if not even neglible in comparison to the similarities.
I know you’re sarcastic, but the serious answer is that the scene in question is a movie invention. Specifically, the invention of a movie that took extreme liberties with the source material and runs on rule of cool.
As for how he can walk on snow, the answer is magic. There’s no explanation in terms of real-world physics, just like for all other magic in Middle-earth, like Beorn’s ability to turn into a bear.
It takes some…liberties with its source material. Aside from having alot of bugs and poor gameplay.
Plus it’s like 70 euro with DLC. And one of the DLC’s is “Sindarin voice pack” to make the elves actually speak Sindarin. Otherwise they speak english.
-Gollum now has a pet bird.
-Gollum has several friends. These include some humans and a girl elf, Mell.
-Gollum is kept as a labour slave in Mordor for several years.
-Gollum escapes Mordor entirely on his own. Sauron does not release him. Infact they hunt him for escaping.
-He is captured in Mirkwood, but teams up with another elf to escape because he made friends with her. The orcs arrive and it seems heavily implied, if not outright said that they came looking for Gollum instead of anything else. They eventually decide they also want the power to control Mirkwood because Gollums friend’s(Mell) mentor has the power to control Mirkwood and makes it so evil can’t pass through it.
I ask because she’s kind of deliberately not quite human looking. It isn’t her real name.
You’ll have to correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought that aside their aging process and knowledge, the only major physical difference was that their eyesight is different, to the point that they can see around Arda’s curve and therefore be able to navigate to Valinor.
I just assumed it was stylized graphics. I don’t know if she looks particularly different from humans in the same game.
Going by screenshots, her appearance is well within real-life human variance, minus the pointy ears. I’ve seen similar looking real people, even her long neck isn’t that unrealistic.
It’s more obvious proportion-wise in a full body picture compared to humans but it’s there. The game’s reputation means there’s no great wealth of sourcing but for the playthroughs on youtube.
man, I am not good enough at strategy games to play the tides of darkness fan-campaign, good grief
the hillsbrad invasion canonically failed as 200 human frigates killed the orcish economy : (
I’ll look.
For now I can say that Tolkien elves are taller than average humans, so if she has a typical height for a Tolkien elf, then the proportions make sense to me. I’ve seen tall women with similar ones in real life, at least. I myself am 190 cm tall and have long thin limbs and a long neck, so even for real-life humans it’s not inherently unrealistic.
But I’ll look at videos and say more.
For the faults that it has, alot if it was ultimately the fault of the publisher and the studio leadership. They had before taking on the project, fired about 150 people, bringing the total studio workforce down to 90. And during development laid off more, making it about 40-50 people to work on this.
It also had unpaid overtime, mandatory crunch, below minimum wage(which is technically illegal) and an almost non-existant budget. They were still forced to follow tight deadlines and told to make it a “AAA” production in terms of quality. The leadership was also allegedly quite abusive beyond just the work practice with allegations of emotional and physical abuse taking place to make people stay in line.
Unsurprising that it shut down due to this, but also sad as apparently it was a well-loved studio in germany for its adventure game titles before this.
Levelled a character through Warlords of Draenor recently and it helped remind me that the draenei are absolutely the most punished race of the Warcraft setting that Blizzard loves to subject to all sorts of horrors.
Even in MU Shattrath the Draenei are known to be exceptionally cruel to the Broken of the city to the point they drive the Broken to unalive themselves by jumping off the upper platform, and it’s a common enough phenomenon that happens on the daily.
Similar situation with the orcs, who are ready to throw down and massacre a population and strip-mine the planet on a moment’s notice
perhaps draenor was a mistake of a planet
what if they’re actually part plant and photosynthesise through sunlight
and that’s why they don’t wear much clothing
sorry, getting a call from someone called “H. Kojima” about plagiarism, brb
Load-bearing faction leader.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4KKf84I6M0
Okay, I’ve looked up videos and I think I see what you mean.
Weirdly, other elves in this game look more human-like and closer to “standard” depictions, so I’m not sure what their reasoning for her design was. If I had to explain some of it, I could maybe hypothesize that she’s this weirdly thin because she was malnourished, being a prisoner and all, but it doesn’t explain her weird look in its entirety.
(What was she imprisoned for, anyway?)
Tolkien elves? If anything, they’re usually depicted overdressed.